📢 Microsoft Teams gets Mesh avatars, Excel Live, Cameo, Premium SKU, and more

Mesh avatars for Microsoft Teams Meetings

During the Ignite 2022 conference, Microsoft announced Mesh avatars for Microsoft Teams. Once available, and activated by your Teams admin, it will offer flexibility and choice in how you show up in Teams meetings with customized, animated versions of yourself. You can design up to three unique avatars using hundreds of options, which will use a wide range of reactions to express yourself without turning on your camera.

Mesh avatars are available in the standard Teams meeting experience for private preview customers. Organizations interested in Mesh avatars can sign up for updates if they are not already in the Teams Technical Adoption Program, says Microsoft.

How to create your Mesh avatars?

To create your Mesh avatar in Microsoft Teams, you can use the Mesh Avatar Builder either of the following ways:

• From the Teams home screen, select the three dots above the Store icon on the left sidebar to launch a search bar. In the search bar, type “Mesh avatars” and select the corresponding app.
• From within a Teams meeting, select the three dots to the left of the Camera icon in the top bar. Select “Effects and avatars”. Then, select “Avatars” from the right column and select “Open Avatars App” in the top “Your Avatar” section.

Once your mesh avatar has been created, you can customize it and join a Teams meeting with the avatar. You can then use the mood toggle and options to adjust the camera angle to show your enthusiasm with just the right reaction.

Excel Live in Teams meeting

This new feature will help the attendees to interact and edit an Excel file right from the meeting itself. This doesn't require you to have Excel running on your device. You can use the shared meeting window as an interactive canvas without anyone having to leave the meeting screen or open the file separately.

Microsoft said that the worldwide roll-out of the Excel Live feature in Microsoft Teams is going to happen this month.

A point to note is that Excel Live went to public preview in the month of July 2022, during the Microsoft Inspire event.

Other new features in Microsoft Teams

• Microsoft announces the rollout of Collaborative annotations in Teams meetings that will leverage the rich toolset and canvas of Whiteboard, allowing you to draw, type, and react directly to content being shared in a Teams meeting.
• Microsoft also announces the general availability of the PowerPoint Cameo feature, which will let you customize how and where you want to appear on your slides, as well as offer design recommendations for optimal viewing.
• Together mode in Teams meeting to get some more innovations. With the latest innovations in Together mode, meeting organizers and presenters can assign seats to meet participants in the Together mode view and select Together mode for everyone in the meeting to have the same view. It is now generally available to Microsoft Teams users.

• Teams Premium is a new, add-on SKU that provides a better way to meet. With these, you can use Meeting guides, custom meeting branding, organizational backgrounds, custom Together mode scenes, watermark, E2E encryption, and sensitivity labels in a Microsoft Teams meeting.
• You can also create AI-generated tasks during and after the meeting, auto-generated chapters, personalized timeline markers, intelligent transcript search, AI-powered Live translation for captions, and more new features added to Microsoft Teams.

What else? There is a long list of features and improvements coming to Microsoft Teams. For a detailed list of features, check out the original announcement published by Microsoft.